Corporate Social Responsibility

At Aquent, it's not just about business for us. We believe that we have a responsibility to support nonprofit organizations, strengthen local communities, promote social justice, environmental sustainability, and lifelong learning, and take an ethical approach to everything we do. Our initiatives and actions include:

Giving back: Designing for Good is our annual competition where we award grants for talent to use their creative skills to benefit nonprofit organizations around the globe. We also encourage our employees to use their unlimited paid time off to volunteer for organizations or causes they feel passionate about.
Fostering racial equality: Through our Social Justice Initiative, we've taken three concrete steps to support racial equality—educating staff about racial injustice and its historical significance, providing time off for employees to vote in local, state, and national elections, and donating and raising more than $110K for more than 30 social justice organizations including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Carbon-negative initiative: We're committed to going carbon negative. We are doing this by becoming a virtual-first workplace, significantly reducing business travel, moving our data centers to utilize renewable hydroelectric power, switching all company-issued computers to more efficient models, and building solar arrays.
Additional earth-friendly practices: Our operations are paperless wherever possible, including talent handbooks, onboarding documents, surveys, timecard approval, invoices, and online pay statements. We've eliminated single-use products. All staff are encouraged to use, reuse, and recycle equipment and materials wisely.
Work experience: Recruiting trainees and interns to provide real-world work experience.
Free courses: Providing free courses in web development, design, UX, accessibility, and more through Aquent Gymnasium. These courses are open to all.
Employee Learning Fund: Annual stipend to support lifelong learning for all our staff with courses, seminars, and events.
Company-wide training: Providing internal training on inclusiveness, mitigating bias, and ethics.
Vendors: Using local and ethically responsible suppliers.

Aquent conducts its affairs in accordance with the highest ethical business practices and complies with all applicable laws and regulations worldwide. Therefore, we have an employee Code of Conduct and Business Ethics (the Code), which sets forth legal and ethical standards of conduct for all officers and employees of Aquent. Aquent communicates this to all employees, and every employee has the duty to read, understand, and comply with the Code. Aquent employees are expected to use good judgment and common sense in complying with the Code, which applies to Aquent and all of its subsidiaries and other business entities controlled by Aquent worldwide. Aquent employees, directors, contractors, and agents are required to comply with all laws, rules, and regulations applicable to Aquent wherever it does business. As part of our commitment to business ethics, Aquent has implemented strong equality, privacy, safety, and anti-slavery and human trafficking policies.

This statement is reviewed and updated annually to make sure we are in compliance with the latest guidelines and to include any new initiatives.

Aquent's Corporate Social Responsibility – Code of Conduct and Business Ethics is in line with Reporting Guidelines 102-16 Values, principles, standards, and norms of behavior and 102-17 Mechanisms for advice and concerns about ethics of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards, GRI 202 General Disclosures 2016.